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a week ago… only a week ago… forever ago… a moment ago… this very moment now? paying for candles in deerfield… out to the car… christmas eve sunny, bright…  back on the highway to turners, to a gale on a glen… no, no, no gales this time… zephyrs on a glen breathing moments from our years… one b.l.t., one egg over easy (what’s that called when it’s runny?), two slices of whole wheat toast… the bright yellow counters that no one (thank zeus) has yet changed…egg-yolk counters, and no one has changed them… olympus forfend…

I’ll go… go again in a few moments more… I’ll sit… sit on the same stool if I can get it… eat the b.l.t. again (no, not that one, not the christmas eve b.l.t., a new one, a gray one)… walk out into the rain and gloom and sour of new year’s eve… but first the stool, the stool with me on it, the one to my right empty… empty today and until who knows when… gales on the glen again today, but a week ago (a moment ago, an age ago), warm winds in yellow and red and green… and when we leave, the river… you take me to look for my friend… my friend is a goose, but this time you don’t mock…

3:00 p.m.

encaved in dark wood, ceiling to floor, we sit, no we sat, caved a second time within our booth… you and I twice encaved… you made no move to escape me this time… I called the bathroom the polar ice… 

you and I, in red shirts and black leggings… as if we’d planned it, but we haven’t planned to dress alike in decades… 

I look at photos on your phone of all that you hold dear, and I’m not there… you have the salad with steak tips, you have the wine… I take water and lobster the scamp (haven’t had lobster since old 98)… you eat cheese from the mushroom caps, whereas I eat it all… we eat, talk, drink, talk, pee in the polar ice with santa… the north pole sparks me… but you it ensnarls… you were once a north-pole girl… how can you look on your old white pole with such disdain… for me your disdain has been there always, but for the cold, no… you once were a snow-girl like me…

but there is no snow… the christmas is empty of snow

you shed tears, and I am disbelief… to see you shed tears in my space after such a space of years… you shed tears for what you hold dear… what you hold dear is in those photos on the phone, where I am not…

we talk of the camp long ago, and in that talk, the beast returns… the beast is hard, the beast begrudges… this beast that never leaves for good, leaves me feeling myself the likes of some dread disease… not the womb, the primal cave… nor the reader of tales and cooker of meals, but something deadly, greatly to be shunned… in that short and small unveiling of the beast, our deep-wood christmas caves fall in on me… I’m once again diminished to a mote in a brown, disdainful eye…

what else do we talk of…? why didn’t I make notes…?  what else do we talk of on a christmas eve that never came before or will again…? how could I let it go by without notes…? I, the compulsive noter of words, let it go by with a dearth of notes…

you pay (I am ever the pauper)… you pay, and we walk to the bookstore… you ask me questions of why the store is where it is and what happened to the old one… you have no memory of the fire… I tell you of the fire, tell you it happened while you were here, tell you you’ve been in the new store before… you have no memory… you seem not to believe… you came to believe my tweets with yoko, but the fire you have wiped from your files… do you believe…?

you buy me a plato-socrates book, but will let me buy you nothing… I’m shrunken again, a smaller mote… I want to buy you the tiny glass starfish you like, tiny and red… it costs almost nothing… why do you not let me… I am diminished again…

we drive on streets with colored lights and then go home… home… we go to a place where I live… we go to a closet where I live… I am of late beset by caves…

6:30 p.m.

you sit in the christmas chair after the gifts… how slowly, carefully you’d opened them… the past was always the rush, the rip… I’d watched you in the colored lights of twinkles and the white flame of candle, the fierce burn with the gentle light… low light of campfire in a cave, the walls close in the stingy space I drown in… I cannot give us space, but there is nothing harsh for light, nothing harsh for words…

I’m sad that the gifts for you are so few, but don’t say it… sad that the gifts are so few, remembering the untied ribbons, remembering how gently you held the glass with the silver snowflake, saying you would never burn a candle in such a glass… I take the pictures, but only when you’re gone understand they are too few… I took the pictures with my dinosaur of film, and only when the time was gone saw there were too few… and then, in a blow, in a blast of shrinking even smaller, remembered that you’d taken (with your phone, with your digits) not a single one of me…

only an hour after the gifts, a scant hour more in the christmas chair, you go to bed… I shame because the bed isn’t one I give you… the bed is a couch downstairs in the room they call common (common to the poor, common to those kept in subsidized cells)… the bed is a serendipity… it’s nothing I provide…

I lie on my loveseat (no bed for me either) wondering if you sleep… the first time I check on you I walk in, say something I’ve forgotten, see you’re comfortable… the second time I only peek through the glass: you’re safe…

sunday 1 january 2012, four a.m.

a week ago… a moment… an age… (time is relative… time warps… it bends)… did einstein know he was mapping memory, mapping heart and soul…?

at dark black morning under half a million stars, I left…  walked the alley that had once been ours, all of ours (yours too)… climbed turquoise stairs to the turquoise slide as once I’d done with the puppy whose life you’d saved… vertigo kept me from calling back that moment in full voice… vertigo stole my star-show first, and after that the clouds…

there I was walking, talking, tossing the flowers… there I was raging at the huge grey hulk that had stolen my christmas stars away… raging, cursing all randomness… cursing until, behind the block where we once lived, those clouds dropped down a paucity of christmas flakes… even for such stinginess I rejoiced: christmas day flakes… one, just one, landed on my cheek, stung that old, sweet sting of our snow (you were once a snow-girl, like me)…

I did those things out there at four a.m., the things I do on christmas and all year, but had you, just this once, to come home to… home… had you, just this once, near my cave to return to…

today, a week later (a week, a moment, a month…) there was the fog… fog that came last night to watch our year drop dead… this fog that likes it here and has stayed for new year’s first cry… today you are not on that couch when I come in from the dark… today I don’t return to you…

7:10 a.m.

who says there are no christmas miralces (you came, didn’t you?)… who says… we listen to the baroque, talk, watch darkness go to light… out of the blue, as we say, you stand, go to the window (I have only one… am beset by caves, by lack)… it’s snowing, you say… I look and see… it’s snowing (who says there are no miracles)… the flakes in the alley were just a taste… now it snows a flurry… snowflakes on christmas so rare here… I tell you this… so rare (and they have come when you have come)… I smile the biggest smile my face can make (and this is rare… I am autistic; this is rare)… yippee erupts from my throat, my mouth, without design, and this yippee is rare, it is real… I am thrilled for real, and have not been thrilled in years… who says there are no christmas miracles… not I, the atheist, because I’ve known them… I know them again this moment: you are here on christmas day, and snowflakes fall…

12:21 p.m.

a week ago… two minutes… a lifetime…? how long ago was it, exactly…? how much heart-time, soul-time, has passed since we went to that woods…? we went to that woods you’d never seen… went to that woods stolen from me nearly four years (a lifetime? a moment?)… went without my dogs, one of whom had once been yours… I hate him, you’d said (how often you hate me, and I you), and you’d left him behind… I’d kept him as to my custom: open arms and heart… loved him with my customed fervor till they stole him from my arms… walked that woods without those dogs for the first time since the theft, and you walked with me… how much shock I felt when you said you would go… to go where you knew I would feel so much pain, and you despise my pain…

you listened to every name of every spot and pool and tree that had been sacred (still sacred, still, though dogs are dead and gone)… you held in your rage… held it in almost complete (don’t worry: almost was good enough)… one hour in this sacred woods… an hour I’ve waited for these years… how totally unthinkable that it was you who gave that hour to me… who says there are no christmas miracles… not I, not the atheist…

4:10 p.m.

you come back from an outing on your own… you walk through the door, my keys go to the vanity… can’t remember now how it happens… how does it happen that we speak about my art, my photos, the music I once wrote… strain and strain the memory, for nothing… can’t remember how it started…

you come back… you give me fifty minutes of attention to my work… most of the work is old, from the nineties to four years ago… don’t do much new art now… you recognize the tree from in ’02 (I’d sent it to you on a bookmark, and forgotten)… you look at other little pieces on the walls… I take down the fairy photo, tell you how I did it, the mistakes I made, and yet it turned out as I’d wanted it… I go to the computer, show you a few things more… you pay attention, attention… is this interest real…? it feels so… for the first time in your life, it feels so…

I dare a further step… open a page of music… show you that I try to make use of the costly software… it’s hard for me, but I try… another shock, my lunge again when you ask to hear the song… you ask to hear the song… I hear the words, see your face as you say them… but can’t believe…

the computer plays the song… you ask for another… the computer and I obey… I can’t believe… a week ago this moment (a day ago, a year ago?), I hear and can’t believe… the songs are ages old… I wrote them outside your bedroom door, the notes outside your bedroom door, the words… you didn’t care… no spark of interest that was real, no pique of curiosity… you didn’t care… yet now you ask for the notes… I can’t believe… am beset by shocks…

a little after five we go away… off again to santaland on griswold (the first time I hadn’t brought the camera)… I take eleven shots, eleven minutes (how many do you take?)… only later, when you’re gone, do I shock again to think we took no photos of each other… no pictures of each other with the christmasland… no pictures of each other…

if allowed, I will defend myself (a defense too weak?)… will say that in your stay I took five shots of you (though not at santaland)… and you took none of me… you did a plastic gnome, a pink sunrise, who knows what else… but never me… the face not seen ten years… you did the plastic gnome, but never me…

(and just on the side, just as an echo of family you had… of family I once thought you loved… just on the side: your grandmother’s eighty-two today… there in that place where you live, there far and gone from me now, and from snow, do you remember…? remember her…? know it’s her birthday…?  if you know that, that’s something… but I know you don’t know eighty-two… you don’t even know how old I am… can’t keep it straight how old we are, any of us… we matter so little, family you had… family I once thought you loved…) 

a week ago today (it’s just a week… a week is only seven days)… a week ago today you took me to my woods (a shock), you asked about my art (another shock)… gifts not from the bankcard, but from you… gifts that shocked, overwhelmed with their largesse… and yet today, a new year’s day, you will not call me back… it’s only a week ago… you don’t call me back…

from santaland we go to jake’s… (for you, for you, since you have done for me)… for your sake I enter a bar on christmas… (to say it even now I cringe) for you I am in a bar on christmas… I who hate bars, I who hate drink, who loathe the stink, the drivel, the culture of drink… I who hold christmas sacred (though an atheist, a godless one), sit in a bar on christmas day… and no, it isn’t any bar… I go into the bar next door, most hated bar on earth… most hated bar whose drunks torment me with their noise at tables out of doors in summer, spring and fall… I the non-drinker, the atheist christmas-holder, sit in the most hated bar on christmas, drink tomato juice, hold my revulsion at bay… I do this ugly thing for you, since you have done for me some things that make you cringe… I put this stain on christmas day because you’ve done for me…

9:20 p.m.

you return from the room they call common… the man on the couch plans to stay all night… the man is there, and you won’t take the loveseat to sleep while he is there… can’t blame you, but I have no bed… can’t blame you, but my floor is hard… I want you to sleep soft, but there is none… the floor of this cell becomes your bed (now we are both beset by caves)… I lay the comforter doubled on the floor (there is little comfort between you and floor), you stretch out with your red pillow special for your bad-disk neck, your pricey velour blanket (this blanket is huge… velour is thick… how much did you pay?… I don’t begrudge you… am only curious) spread over you, head-top to toe… you sleep three feet away from me… sleep three feet away for the first time in twenty years… you are three feet away in the christmas night, a candle aflame… the twinkle lights lit… you are three feet away in my low-lit cave… I can’t believe… 

monday 2 january 2012, 3:30 a.m.

I can’t find sleep again… doesn’t matter… can sleep when you’re gone… have slept so little since you came… doesn’t matter… awake in the black morning, candle aflame… twinkle lights lit… you are three feet away… can’t believe…

can’t turn on the radio for pete and the classics… five a.m. will come, morning edition, can’t turn it on… might disturb you… you’re only three feet away (still can’t believe)… want to walk the dark morning like yesterday, can’t… you’re there on the floor but you’re leaving… have to stare at you on that floor, step over you in this cell when I need to pee…

you said, on christmas eve day, you’d stay till tuesday morning… later you said monday night… later still, monday afternoon… the first christmas in thirteen years is amputated to sixty-four hours… you’re leaving when you rise from that floor… I ignore the dark morning’s calls to me, and the river’s… I stay and watch you on my floor…

and then your head rises at seven… you stand up your length… the end begins… brushing hair, taking blanket and suitcase to car, back in my door to fetch another load… while I, holding my begging inside (please stay till tomorrow, please, please… after ten faceless years, please give me more day)… my begging would only bring the harsh words, the demeaning face… I hold my begging inside and pack up the food… corned beef and cabbage, cheesecake, cherry pie, maple syrup… I pack up the bag of food with a content façade, but the begging encaved inside me is already crying tears…

skinny fifty minutes from the floor-rising to sitting in the car beside you (last time)… riding to the store beside you (last time)… watching you make coffee at the front while I shop… watching the back of you make coffee for yourself (last coffee from this town)… the pleading for more time, for one day more after all the years (one decade or three? time is relative… it bends, it warps… the time on the clock is far out of synch with the time of the heart)…

how does it happen that so very soon, in a nanosecond, I think, we are parked again at the curb where I live… my shopping sits under a cherry tree, my camera in my hands… you lean against the car, I take the last shot on the roll (my dinosaur of film… I happen to love)… we make the hug again, same as we did on arrival… in sixty-four hours it has grown no tighter… still weak, still tentative and tenuous… still not a real hug… there’s a spit of snowflakes falling to say good-bye… you point them out to me, knowing I love them… (you were once a snow-girl, like me)… you drive away and I watch, the begging now roiling inside me… because of the little hill, your car vanishes fast, and now there’s not even a watching left for me…

I check the time (my asperger’s must always know the time)… you drive away at eight-sixteen… arrived at four-oh-seven, left at eight-sixteen…

one week later… no, it may in fact be a month… heart-time has a measure of its own… one week later, says the calendar… you won’t answer my call… one week later I am, suddenly (as suddenly as it has changed all the years of your life) no longer wanted, no longer deserve respect, or even courtesy…

suddenly a different thing has arisen from the floor of your brutal (for me) inner world, and I am (again) shunned… so it has always been… how, exactly, did your inner world shatter into pieces that won’t unite again…? you’re gone again… on top of that I’m shunned again… the ancient blows continue…

but… BUT.. you came… to the last second, I waited for the back-out… but you came… gave me more yule gifts than ever before… the ones that cost money, the ones that cost heart… that walk in my woods is the shiningest, and that, of course, you came… I’m shunned again, at least for a while…

I find some long hairs, your hairs, around the cell (beset by caves) and tape them to the bathroom wall… a physical part of you left behind unconsciously… a physical part I can touch… a part I can’t put in the wastebasket… these hairs on the wall: the desperate calling of blood to blood…

yes, for me, for who I am and how I’m made, the call to blood is desperate… the lack of blood is a cave of incompleteness, involuntary amputation, constant, unslakable thirst…

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we flow, you and I… you loathe that flow, mostly; you dam and scorn it… but we flow, as all blood flows, and you cannot evaporate it, however you try… we flow, you and I… amid the grinding and scraping and letting of blood, we flow…

so tell me, someday before I die:  is the stream of me that flows in you despised beyond mercy…? is it as tiny, leached of value, as you seem to wish it…? will the stream of me that flows in you grow wider, grow even somewhat loved, when I am gone for good…? beset by caves, beset by shocks, in love with snow, I ask you only from a silent distance the words I won’t dare speak… don’t speak for fear of wrath, of cruel response: does the stream of me that flows in you have value? will you let it grow wider, stop damming it, when I am in the ground, the last cave, the one I never leave?

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read…  twenty-ninth december  (companion piece)

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2009-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

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let it all just blur… let all the lines unsharpen, this verge into that… why should I care? let it melt to an absurd fuzz of indistinct masses… it was always absurd anyway. let it melt and drip and blur into the absurdity it always and always was… I shouldn’t be here anyway, not now…

stop assaulting me with sharp delineations… be the misted mysterious, just as handy illusion (I will never not know what the misted really means)… assault me instead with bach-notes whispering eternal… a fugue as that dead tree, a brandenburg as that canal, another for the lines of the former church of anne… the church of anne is indistinct in visions, but whispers a brandenburg without cease…

let me proceed, one footfall and another, in notes… my ears will tell me bearings, will say: violin partita three is the little house from which you were thrown; sheep may safely, safely is the house on n street… ears will tell me where I am, ears and the gibraltar of his notes… eyes will tell me only the absurdity of melted mass… let dysesthesia draw the map…

let the gestalt all change… put away eyes for ears… let only those who bless the mist and breathe notes for landmarks harry me on the routelines that I crying roam…

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read…   Extemporaneana…   Being toward death…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2009-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

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a 5 and a 2. this is for you, you know that. a 5 and a 2… do I have all my numbers and dates right?… I passed that 5 and that 2 so long ago it feels like a decade… didn’t get to pass them in a house with two cars and two incomes and any kind of comfort born of money and a human. had to pass them hard… the easiness of your years compared to mine causes one of our favorite things, yours and mine: bitterness…

all you needed to do was say that my idea was just as possible as yours… or, later, just to say the word sorry… sorry I didn’t give your thoughts as much credence as I gave my own… so simple to me, so do-able. but wasn’t done. simple words weren’t said. and in that stinginess, everything of value was tossed out… I couldn’t go on without credence.

maybe the value was only there for me. that seems to happen way too much… maybe those letters and calls were only dear to me, and the loss of them for you is relief… maybe the cards and gifts reached my heart and not yours, or not yours deep enough… not deep enough to overcome your me-world… no one must expect from you.

it surprises me that you could get to 5 and 2, that you could read  those hundreds of books, that you could baby a baby who brings home the big bucks for so many years and not know… not know that closeness has expectations built in, on both sides…  you expected from me too. expected my mind (you called it formidable)  to stimulate you… expected to be a writer vicariously, through me… but you wanted it for free. no expectations on my part. and you expected me not to be fragile… that’s pretty damned arrogant, you know. you who have had so much ease and comfort compared to me. you who have never had everything destroyed. to expect me not to be fragile. what right do you have to expect that…

it surprises me to have found that you can’t be honorable for very long. I’d thought you other than that…

I’d like to be calling for 5 and 2… would like to have sent a gift. longing for the way it was last year…

but I need credence, to be believed and believed in. I went without other things from you, stayed on because of what was good. but couldn’t go on without belief.

little equations learned along the way… the more selfishness, the more arrogance, the more difficult the words I’m sorry. impossible, in the end. an admission of mistake the ego can’t bear. a loss of face that can’t be endured. 5 and 2 is still too young to suck it up and take the loss of face. it passes, this perceived diminishment… it passes once it’s done, once the way is cleared for the bright things to go on…

always it comes back to only me: it was important only to me. it was worth trying to keep, only to me… to you it was a weight. to you it was expectations intruding into me-ness. to you it was all better gone…

when my day comes, will you think? will you write? will you regret?…. no, no and no, I know. know already before I ask the questions. no. people’s favorite word to give me. life’s favorite word to give me…

I remember 5 and 2, and you, and last year, and what was and what wasn’t… I see the empty space where all that was. do you?… no, no and no.

why did you come looking for me, if self-involved was all you wanted to be? why did you even come looking?

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read…    Braon…   Sehnen...   Soulcast…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2009-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

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read…   Scealta liatha…     Shadowpoems…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2009-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

Alan is yet another public radio voice/personality who was a very large part of my own now vanished life. I’m going to discuss something childish and, to me, offensive that Alan’s been doing for the last two days, but don’t let that give you a wrong impression. He has many qualities that I both respect and admire. Like Bob Paquette, Alan is a tireless and passionate champion for his radio station (WAMC in Albany). Also like Bob, Alan does a great deal in the community outside the station doors. But another truth about Alan is that he is definitely a type-A personality (like me), and unlike Bob, who seemed to be one of the calmest people on the planet. Bitter irony that Alan and I, the type-A-heart-attack types, are alive today, while Bob, the soul of calm, is dead now two weeks.

I’ve been listening to the WAMC fund drive this week, something I haven’t done since my life was stolen three years ago. And it’s precisely because of Bob’s death that I’m doing it. I deeply miss Bob’s voice on my radio every weekday morning, a voice that was both beautiful in itself, and also a means for me to travel in my heart back to my own life that’s gone. I decided that the Albany fund drive would be another vehicle to carry me back to what I grieve every day.

Alan has always taken occasional pot-shots at Bob’s station (WFCR in Amherst MA). The two stations are more and more in competition for territory, listeners and donations with every year that’s passed since about 2006. And to a degree, I take those pot-shots at WFCR too. In 2006 at least one person was hired to WFCR whom I loathe, and who, I believe, set out to intensify this competition between the two stations. And this person found in the upper-level management of the station a few people who are weak and were only too willing to be dictated to and pushed around by this newcomer. This handful of individuals have made some changes since 2006 that Alan and I both find heinous, things that no public radio station ought to do. So I understand and share some of his vitriol, which he has been spitting out periodically over the last two days.

But Alan tends to forget all of the others who work at WFCR — dedicated, hard-working people just like his own staff. They don’t get to make the big decisions, they just work loyally and hard, year after year, the way Bob did. Because Bob Paquette died only 9 or 10 days before Alan’s fund drive began, I am both offended and disgusted by Alan’s current jibes at WFCR. That entire staff has just lost a friend, their most important on-air voice, and a tireless worker who had other functions at the station besides on-air hosting. I would think Alan would have the compassion and decency to just keep his trap shut about WFCR at this time of their loss. Their own live fund drive begins, I think, tomorrow, and this is the first time they have to do it without Bob.

If I had the ambition to call Alan, I’d say: Look, the people who make the nasty decisions at WFCR are a very few, and I’ll gladly spit at them with you another time. But Bob wasn’t one of them, so far as I know. He was a decent, kind man who worked as hard for his station as your staff works for theirs. He was as loyal to WFCR as you are to WAMC. And he was too young, at 55, to die of a heart attack a mere two weeks ago. Show some respect.

But I don’t have the ambition to call Alan, so I write this instead. This I can do without the anxiety attack that would come from talking to people I don’t know well. And though I called many people at four different radio stations back in my own life, PTSD and anxiety are much worse now, and now I can’t do such things. But back in the day, some of the radio people also called me. And, to whip out the irony again, two of the radio people who telephoned me in the past were Alan Chartock and Bob Paquette.

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read…    The death of Bob Paquette…   Being toward death…

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A man named Bob Paquette died this weekend. Don’t know yet whether it was on Saturday or Sunday. Don’t know how. Presumably these details will be forthcoming from the radio station where he worked. Our local public radio station, WFCR in Amherst.

I didn’t know Bob Paquette, but he was nonetheless an important part of my life, especially my own life, the one that a herd of slavering humans took from me more than three years ago…

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Now it’s several hours later, and the radio station has just given out more details. Bob was fifty-five, a gay man who left behind a husband (gay marriage is permitted in Massachusetts), died of “an apparent heart attack,” and did many more things in the community with his presence and his voice and his name-recognition than I ever knew about when he was alive. They still haven’t told us whether he died on Saturday or Sunday, and maybe that’s a little oversight they haven’t even noticed. They are reporters, yes, and should give us all the details. But they’re also his colleagues and friends, and they’re very upset. Their loss is on a completely different plane from mine.

The station has also sent those of us on its email list a photo of Bob. Finally, eleven and a half years after first hearing his voice, I know what he looked like. But now he’s gone.

In November 1999 I became a public radio listener. I could no longer afford cable TV, so I had turned to radio for sound and company, and within a year was so converted by public radio that I remain grateful to this day that financial duress drove me to the old fashioned (I thought then) notion of listening to radio when I wasn’t in a car. Bob’s voice was the second one I met as a new listener. That voice was beautiful, to my ear at least. And since he was the local host of NPR’s longest and flagship show, Morning Edition, I heard more of his voice than of any other at the Amherst station.

Over these radio years I’ve heard dozens and dozens of listeners call in during fund drives and say that their local radio personnel are “members of the family,” “good friends,” and other such phrases that describe bonding. And if such a sense of bonding can occur among people who have family and friends who love them, among people who are not drastically isolated and alone, imagine how much more these radio personnel mean to a person who is devastatingly all alone. I had my animals until three years ago, and that was a tremendous companionship, but in the realm of human beings, I have been for the most part unconscionably left alone by people since 1995, even by people who have professed to care about me.

Into this very deep void came the radio, and most especially the staffs of the three public radio stations I ultimately ended up using: Albany, New York; Keene, New Hampshire; and Amherst, Mass. Bob’s beautiful speaking voice, his sense of humor and his constant presence, the stability of it, were a huge part of what public radio poured into the void for me. His voice was one of my six absolute favorites on all of public radio, both local and national (the others, still living as far as I know, were Susan Forbes Hanson, Priscilla Drucker, John Montanari, Lisa Simione, and Mary Darcy). His voice every weekday morning from 5-9, and in the afternoons on occasional news spots, and paired with a co-worker’s during fund drives, was like a friend talking to me every day, a friend I could count on. His voice was a part of my own life, the one now gone.

Of course I feel the sadness that any listener who never actually met Bob, never knew him in any way but the radio way, would have. Fifty-five is too soon to go. I wince these last two mornings not hearing him talk to me over the airwaves. I can empathize with the amplified grief his friends and loved ones feel. But for me there is an element of loss that is unique, and is also, I’m fully aware of this, selfish: Bob Paquette’s voice and personality coming to me over the radio were a large mosaic tile in the larger work that was my own life. Many, many tiles were stolen from that picture in 2008. So many that the picture no longer exists in any recognizable form. Bob was one of the tiles I had left, since Morning Edition is one of the few radio shows I can still listen to now that my animals are gone. My grief is for that as well: one piece of the very few that remained to me now taken, leaving even less of my own life for me to touch in this new, barren existence that is mine now. Made more barren by the loss of a radio friend, a companion and stable constant whom I never even truly met.

I miss you, Bob Paquette.

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read…   Alan shartock…   Being toward death…

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what was I to her, by the time it ended…   maybe just another bit she forced herself to do…  another disruption of solitude… don’t forget the dreaded expectations. she can’t stand expectations. self-involved to the core, but that shouldn’t have surprised me. shouldn’t have, but did…   what did she come looking for here…  I only know hints: the life of the mind…  godlessness…  a dead-end street that still exists, but doesn’t…  so what were the things that looked like caring, that looked like meeting expectations, that looked like open-heartedness? were they clever sleights-of-hand? were they genuine, but flimsy, couldn’t last?…   books, books, books…  not understanding that you can go past that… that things can happen that erase parts of you you thought were unerasable… having it so easy, by comparison, being so wrapped and comfortable…  wrapped up and comfortable and self-involved, but still wanted… wanted for the past, and the present too. wanted for the mind and the godlessness and the bitter poems and the gratitude of being wanted…  wanted to mail cards to… wanted for the words every day, the thread to another… wanting to be believed. would she want her thinking doubted. I could have doubted certain things, I could have thought her exaggerating, whining… could have, but didn’t. loyalty made belief and the past made belief, but why not both ways…

was I just one more great weight to be lifted…

tinkering with things she gave me… the things I can touch and the ones I can’t… tinker with the ones she wouldn’t give, know that it was only the one, that certain weighty one that I couldn’t get past… validity… no, no, on this I won’t agree to disagree, not on this failure to give character to character…  why not I’m sorry… why not this: I should have said your thoughts were possible, at least possible… I knew that we were dealing with a problem child… I should have said your thoughts were possible… why not I’m sorry…

because it doesn’t matter… another great weight has been lifted and why ask it back…  does it matter…

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(photo by an anonymous contributor)

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On my way to this blog, I saw a WordPress feature with the line: Can you write in coffee shops? Of course such a question made the mind of a lifelong writer wander over my own personal answers to that question. In my life before the internet entered it in a big way, which wasn’t until 2008, I wrote and wrote, since nine years old. I wrote, for years, in notebooks in bedrooms, or at picnic tables. College years expanded my writing-process horizons: I wrote in bars (in those very long-ago days when I drank), restaurants, cafés, parks, and more. Besides the usual notebook-in-a-bedroom scenario, I began writing on napkins, paper towels, Bierdeckel in Germany, and on any ink-absorbing, portable surface I could find when no notebook was to hand. Poems for many years, and journals. But later I added short stories to the practice, beginnings of plays, beginnings of novels, and one novel that actually got written to its end. The person who is compelled from childhood to write, if I am any testimony, can write just about anything and just about anywhere.

But, a lifelong writer with PTSD who gets yet another trauma foisted on them, the worst one of all of the traumas, gets changed. At least this one did. It’s no longer possible for me to write fiction, so there go all the unfinished short stories, plays and novels that before 2008 I had vague plans to return to someday — when I had got myself and my animals to a reasonably safe place with a reasonably safe/sane landlord. This never happened. Instead there was destruction, theft, death, homelessness, secrets and lies. No fiction can come out of me anymore. Even poetry, the genre I’ve been writing the longest, is most of the time too difficult to read and too difficult to write. All I can write now is the truth. The truth about people and events in my years, and how they affected me. The truth about my animals.

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I came to this blog today, or so I thought, to write about my newest loss, and then saw that feature that took my mind down the byways of my writing life, such as it has been. What did I want to say about the newest loss? That I’d feared for several months that it was creeping up in ways both subtle and not? That I’d hoped the moment would never come (as I always hope) when some word, or action, or lack of same, would shut me down to the point where I wouldn’t be able to go on in the relationship? I suppose I wanted to say all of those things, and others.

In the past, for I don’t know how many decades, I would stay in certain relationships for years. Years that I waited and waited for certain issues in those relationships to end, to be dealt with and dismissed. Finally let’s just get past this particular thing… but the getting past never happened, ever. Now I don’t wait years anymore. Not even two years. If a certain little monster in a relationship keeps rearing its head and that monster is never sent into its little cave forever, never to be seen again, then I go. The mental weariness from the appearance of human stuff that is hurtful to me, and heavy-handed, and that I don’t deserve, isn’t something I can take for years anymore. I can no longer take it very long at all. I look back over life and wish I hadn’t ever put up with such gunk for more than a couple of years before walking away and saving myself many more years of mental and emotional assaults.

As always, at the end I am confused. So many mixed messages come from human beings. What was I in the life of this person with whom I now seem to be parting? As always, I had hoped to be something good in a person’s life, an asset. A flawed asset, of course, as every person is flawed, but on the whole an asset. Was I an asset for a while, and then did I become something else? In my constant losing battle to figure human beings out, at least the ones I get close with, I think this is the thing that usually happens: people start out with me wanting something from me. I am penniless, so it is almost never anything material that people want from me. They have wanted things like my brains, my wry humor, my shoulder to cry on (I have no problem with this, as long as their shoulder is there for me too), or my free rides or free babysitting or free advice about their sick animals. Many people have wanted to be entertained by me, both intellectually and in other ways. They have wanted such intangibles, and I have usually been slavishly willing to provide them for people I like and care about and hope to keep in my life. But what they also often want is for me to “get better” in the beatific light of their friendship, that they deem should heal all wounds. Magic will somehow eradicate depression and PTSD and physical illnesses and poverty. Some people want this miraculous healing to a greater degree than others do.

But people want what they want for free. At least in my life they do. They want whatever they want from me without having to give in exchange the things that I’d like from them. Or if they launch a campaign to give some of those things, they soon tire of it. They don’t want emotional obligations to me, they don’t want the obligation of behaving honorably in the context of the particular relationship we are having. They don’t want to discipline themselves to remember, and this is especially important since the events in my life that began three years ago, that I have lost much more all in a moment than they have ever lost in the same space of time. That I was thrown out on the street, and this has never been done to any of them. That they live in houses and I live in a ponystall. To remember how much I’ve been through these last three years, and how much stinking luckier they all are than I have been. That when we part after a visit or a phone call, they return, for the most part, to their houses and their cars and their hubbies or doting children, and I return to a ponystall and no car and no person at all to be a daily companion and support for me. I return to the emptiness left behind after the stealing and killing of the only beings who did give me daily companionship, and to the shuddering memories of everything that has happened in the last three years. I return to things I can hardly bear anymore, and I need people who profess to care about me to remember this. To remember that after our phone call or visit, I will return to the same deprivations and nightmares every single day, and wake up again in them the next day, and that daily contact with some other person who cares about me —- something all of them get —- is something I need, and it is not weird or freaky or too demanding, since as far as I can see all people need this.

And I need to be believed, and believed in, as I think most people do, by the people who profess to care about me.

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When any relationship ends, it leaves behind a hole, at least for me. The hole where the good things about the person and the interaction with them were. This time the hole is deeper, because this particular person had more significance for me than anyone has had in decades. And then there are the precious vestiges: the letters, the gifts, the photos. These things to be poured over and touched when the hole aches, pathetically, I suppose, enshrined as sacred artifacts of a person and a time that were so important to me, and in which, for a while, I felt safe. Why can’t the safety hold, is one thing I’ve always wanted to know. Why do the knives and thorns eventually have to be wielded, little stabs here and little stabs there, until I can’t stick around and be stabbed anymore. Why can’t the fact that I feel safe with them move any person to refrain from pulling out sharp instruments, from taking from me that safe place that I need? Why does there seem to be some kind of salacious enjoyment in the cutting, in the slicing up of safety and gratitude? Are human beings just that universally energized by exercising the power to hurt?
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(women are clippings)
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and a greenfield satyr as well, yesterday… we know him as Matthew.                                       

just meandering again. it’s almost the ides. but I and mine were wasted before the fifteenth, so what are the ides to me.

am in, as periodically happens, an intensification of the chronic, monopolar depression. haven’t felt like doing much new writing, and so what. there’s plenty of old writing to organize. haven’t felt like doing much of anything.

am on Twitter, since last summer, and have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. some of my followers are engaging, both their tweets and their interests. some are much less so. I now have some foreigners in my mix: germans and dutch and aussies and turks and greeks. this makes me feel a little teensy bit like a less ugly amerikan. some animal people and autism people and atheist people and science and book people are among my little group. I have a doctor, and a dentist, and a veterinarian. some come from the lunatic fringe to follow me, and I block them. haven’t I had enough lunatics destroying everything that mattered to me? don’t misapprehend: compared to just about everyone else on Twitter, I have almost no followers, and follow almost none. but even the small number I have is beginning to be hard to manage. because I’m a weirdo who actually likes to read the tweets of most of my followers, and perhaps retweet or reply to them. and you really need to keep your gang manageable if you want to do that.

today there was a tweet from one of my autism people, called Andrea. she put up a quote I’d never seen before, and it is absolute truth, and I wanted to have it somewhere on my website:

as if it weren’t already abundantly clear, many of the humans of my years decided to stunt and wilt and kill me, rather than nourish. I’ve always liked Plato.

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The second Wednesday in March… again. How can it be three years already? How can it be only three years?

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                                    nemo nobis pacem donavit 

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